1 May 2010

Dear Professor Driscoll, Professor Ahmad, Professor House, and Professor Esche,

I am writing to express my dismay at your decision to close Middlesex’s Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy.

The Centre has achieved international renown and is widely recognized as a beacon of academic excellence. I count myself fortunate to have worked there as a Research Fellow from 2002 to 2008. Your claim that the Centre has made no “measurable contribution” to Middlesex is spectacularly ludicrous when one considers its outstanding performance in the most recent Research Assessment Exercise and the remarkable success of its graduate programmes, which consistently attract students from all over the world.

Your decision to close the Centre effectively advertises your complete disregard for academic excellence and will prove ruinous for Middlesex’s credibility as an academic institution. You may not care about these things, but rest assured that the vast majority of prospective students do, not to mention the international academic community, in whose eyes you have now utterly discredited Middlesex.

You can still salvage Middlesex’s reputation by reversing this astonishingly short-sighted decision. I urge you to reconsider.

Yours sincerely,
Dr. Ray Brassier
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy
American University of Beirut.